Participatory research for developing health promotion campaigns for migrants and host community in Berlin, Germany

Abstract

Background: During the current refugee crisis, hundreds of refugees left their homes and fled to Europe. The country that received the highest rates of refugees was Germany, which above all presented a challenge to the healthcare system. This study aimed to inform the development of a pilot intervention to improve migrants healthcare access in Berlin, Germany. Methods: A Metaplan© qualitative technique was applied to ensure the community participation, with three sessions with refugee and asylum seeking women and youth in Arabic, Somali and German languages, and one with professionals. With each group, participants identified issues in migrants’ healthcare, then suggested solutions to address these issues and prioritized these solutions. Results: The migrants (n = 30) were mainly from Syria (n = 4), Somalia (n = 14) and other African countries, mainly females (17-53 yrs) and youth (16-18yrs). The professionals’ group (n = 13) included an interdisciplinary team of a psychiatric day clinic. All groups prioritized language barriers as a crucial problem and suggested to work with interpreters to facilitate the communication. Professionals are additionally confronted with cultural differences in the treatment of refugees. Somali women prioritized raising the awareness about Female Genital Mutilation in the healthcare system and also in their community. Other suggestions included supervisors for unaccompanied minors, multilingual forms, increased intercultural competence of health care providers and reducing waiting time for an appointment. Conclusions: Future interventions should focus on intercultural competences for professionals and health-promoting information in the specific sociocultural context of migrant communities. This would include the dissemination of multi-lingual doctors’ brochures, interactive training for health care providers as well as informational workshops for migrants to increase their health literacy and promote health-enhancing behaviors.